Olinger murder to be featured in NBC News-produced show

An NBC news crew will be in Monterey this weekend filming a segment about the 1997 murder of Kristopher Eric Olinger.

The team is filming the piece for the series "Dead of Night" on the Investigation Discovery Channel, a production of NBC News and Peacock Productions. It is tentatively scheduled to run in April 2014.

Producer Leslie Zaleskie said NBC selected the case after reading local news accounts of the trial of Jacobo Ruelas, 34, a Soledad father who was convicted of the grisly murder Oct. 2. Ruelas is slated to be sentenced Wednesday to life in prison without parole.

"I was attracted to the story because of how passionately so many people fought to bring Kris' case to justice: from Kris' parents all the way through to Ms. (prosecutor Jeannine) Pacioni," Zaleskie said. "It's inspirational. The case was destined to join the hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders in this country, but some key people decided that was not going to happen this time, to this family."

Among the people were Olinger's mother, Shell Phillips, and stepfather, Loren Phillips, who raised him since he was 4 years old.

Shell Phillips, who walked door to door to raise funds for a reward in an effort to solve her son's murder, died of cancer in 2003. Her husband, who carried on her crusade and became president of the Restorative Justice Commission because of it, died in 2008 after a stroke.

Travis Phillips, who was 10 years old when his brother was killed, said his parents died of broken hearts.

Olinger, a 17-year-old Monterey High School student, left friends just before midnight Sept. 18, 1997, to photograph the ocean in the light of a nearly full moon. His body was found by a jogger before dawn near the Pacific Grove Recreation Trail.

He was beaten and stabbed 29 times, then thrown from a cliff onto rocks 15 feet below. He survived long enough to pull himself up to a turnout on the side of the road, where he died.

The case went unsolved for years. Olinger's mother died without answers. In 2005, after prodding by Loren Phillips and launch of a new state palm print database, the Department of Justice got a match between a print found on Olinger's car and a print in the system that belonged to Ruelas. Fingerprints and DNA put his younger brother, Angel Ruelas, there as well.

Police spent the next several months developing confidential witnesses who would testify against the brothers, including two who said they watched them randomly target, carjack and kill Olinger at the Recreation Trail.

The brothers, who were 18 and 17 at the time of the murder, were arrested in 2006. Because Jacobo Ruelas was an adult at the time of the crime, prosecutors decided to seek the death penalty against him and try the brothers separately, with Jacobo first.

Loren Phillips attended each of their dozens of hearings before his death. In 2011, after five years of delays, Travis Phillips said he had enough. He asked the District Attorney's Office to take the death penalty off the table to get the case to trial.

It did and the cases were joined, but moments before jury selection was to begin April 24, 2012, Angel Ruelas pleaded guilty.

Through his attorney, he said he wanted to spare Olinger's family the pain of a trial. He said he wanted to meet with Travis Phillips as part of the Restorative Justice program that unites victims and perpetrators for healing and rehabilitation.

That meeting has yet to happen. Angel Ruelas was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

The trial moved forward for Jacobo Ruelas, but two days later, his attorney had a heart attack and was forced to withdraw from the case. It would take Pacioni and the new defense attorney, Andrew Liu, 17 months to get the case back before a jury.

Travis Phillips, his aunts, uncle and grandfather attended each day of the proceedings, during which the 16th anniversary of Olinger's slaying passed. They were there on Oct. 2 when the jury convicted Jacobo Ruelas and they will be there on Wednesday for his sentencing.